Antonio Balderas

Universidad de Cádiz | UCA · Department of Computer Science & Engineering

La comprensión de las bases de datos no solo requiere conocimientos técnicos, sino también una capacidad para conceptualizar y organizar información de manera lógica y sistemática, lo cual puede resultar desafiante para muchos estudiantes de informática. Para ayudar al estudiante en el aprendizaje y entrenamiento de SQL, este trabajo presenta la he...

Chatbots have arrived in higher education, and professors are trying to make the most of them. Typically, chatbots are used to help students learn academic subjects. In times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, students who were not living with their families during the course, especially international students, were isolated and in critical...

Erasmus students spend part of their academic stage in a foreign country, which enriches their experience significantly. During the second semester of the 2019–20 academic year and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students found themselves isolated and confined in a country that was not their own. Students lived with uncertainty and many doubts a...

SQL is a key programming language for data scientists, but its learning is sometimes challenging, especially if the learner does not have a proper computer science background. This article introduces ChatbotSQL, a conversational agent that aims to support the autonomous learning of the SQL language for database querying. ChatbotSQL proposes exercis...

Aunque el uso de herramientas de evaluación automáticas ha ido en crecimiento en las últimas décadas, con la llegada de la pandemia del COVID-19 su uso se hizo aun mayor. Entre las herramientas de evaluación automática destacan los cuestionarios, que suelen venir integrados en los principales LMS con una gran variedad de opciones para personalizarl...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to face-to-face activities being developed in a virtual format that often offers a poor experience in areas such as education. Virtual Learning Environments have improved in recent years thanks to new technologies such as Virtual Reality or Chatbots. However, creating Virtual Learning Environments requires advanced pro...

The diversity of information sources available to educational institutions makes it necessary to mash up information in order to get the highest performance through learning analytics. Data mashup requires the implementation of data anonymisation methods in order to protect the privacy of the learners who appear in the data partitions. However, the...

Learning the SQL language for working with relational databases is a fundamental subject for future computer engineers. However, in distance learning contexts or unexpected situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, where students had to follow lectures remotely, they may find it hard to learn. Chatbots are software applications that aim to have conver...

Virtual Worlds (VWs) are popular tools for teaching/learning in the twenty-first century classroom. The challenge remains however, to provide the means by which teachers could sustainably analyse and assess the performance of large groups of students in such environments. Unfortunately, external game features such as game scores and play duration h...

Lecturers are often reluctant to set examinations online because of the potential problems of fraudulent behaviour from their students. This concern has increased during the coronavirus pandemic because courses that were previously designed to be taken face-to-face have to be conducted online. The courses have had to be redesigned, including semina...

Higher education degrees should be rigorously designed in terms of competencies, learning outcomes, and assessment formats to provide meaningful and valuable information for students and faculty. However, doing this with traditional methods is not an easy task, as current tools do not support adequate coordination between those responsible for degr...

Las titulaciones en educación superior deben estar rigurosamente diseñadas en términos de competencias, resultados de aprendizaje y medios de evaluación que ofrezcan una información útil y valiosa para estudiantes y profesorado. Sin embargo, realizar esta labor con los medios tradicionales no es una tarea sencilla, pues las herramientas actuales no...

SQL es un lenguaje ampliamente usado en ingeniería informática, siendo uno de los pilares fundamentales en la explotación de bases de datos relacionales desde hace décadas. Sin embargo, a pesar de ser un lenguaje aparentemente sencillo, su aprendizaje a fondo suele presentar dificultades para los estudiantes, sobre todo cuando se realiza de manera...

Virtual learning environments contain valuable data about students that can be correlated and analyzed to optimize learning. Modern learning environments based on data mashups that collect and integrate data from multiple sources are relevant for learning analytics systems because they provide insights into students’ learning. However, data sets in...

Competitions are being widely used to motivate students in diverse learning processes, including those in computer programming. This paper presents a methodology for designing and assessing competitive learning scenarios that allow students to develop three different coding skills: the ability to compete against unknown competitors, the ability to...

SQL es un lenguaje ampliamente usado, siendo uno de los pilares fundamentales en la formación de los ingenieros en informática. Sin embargo, su aprendizaje suele presentar dificultades para los estudiantes, sobre todo cuando gran parte del estudio de la materia se realiza de manera autónoma. En este trabajo, se desarrolla un agente conversacional (...

The global irruption of ‘shared-accommodation platforms’ has ignited debate regarding the implications of the unprecedented growth of the short-term rental market. While some argue that they have generated new business, work and wealth others, highlight their wider societal, economic and legal effects. Short-term rental removes long-term housing fr...

In March 2020, due to the Covid19 pandemic, higher education had to switch from face-to-face to exclusively virtual mode overnight. In this unexpected scenario, supervisors also had to adapt the assessment procedures, including the exams. This caused a significant controversy, as, according to many students, supervisors were more concerned about ho...

En el marco de la educación superior, una descripción efectiva de competencias, resultados de aprendizaje e instrumentos de evaluación es fundamental en el diseño de asignaturas. La concreción de estos tres componentes es una tarea que el profesorado realiza de forma autónoma o, a lo sumo, en colaboración con otros colegas, pero sobre la base de su...

Teamwork is one of the key issues in engineering projects success. Unfortunately, due to the high number of interactions, the assessment of collaborative tasks remains a challenge. Wikis are web-based systems that support collaborative work in enterprise engineering project documentation providing quantitative data from the members' contributions a...

Se describen las líneas de investigación del grupo Mejora del Proceso Software y Métodos Formales de la Universidad de Cádiz, en relación a las tecnologías del aprendizaje e informática educativa. Palabras clave: Computación creativa, desarrollo centrado en el usuario, wikis, analítica del aprendizaje, juegos aplicados, aprendizaje móvil de idiomas...

Students in higher education are traditionally requested to produce various pieces of written work during the courses they undertake. When students' work is submitted online as a whole, both the ethically questionable act of procrastinating and late submissions afect performance. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of students...

Organizations need employees who perform satisfactorily in generic skills, such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving or interpersonal abilities, among others. In organizational environments, employees perform work that is not always visible for supervisors and, thus, they can hardly assess their performance in generic skills. By using a knowled...

The present proposal advocates for the use of Spaced Repetition System (SRS) in Computer-Assisted Language Training as a particular applicable cognitive approach for a personalised language learning system in a Higher Education virtual environment. To this end, the recently developed online SMCP-Training tool has been modelled to provide a sequence...

Wikis are appropriate tools for deploying authentic assessment experiences for learning and work scenarios in which a group of users are asked to develop a shared task. However, when the number of wiki users increases, the number of contributions can grow at a pace whereby accurately assessing them becomes a complex and non-scalable task. While dif...

Wikis are well known systems to support collaborative assignments. They provide a digital platform for asynchronous collaboration between students under the monitoring of a supervisor. Additionally, as all the students interactions are recorded in the wiki database, teachers can retrieve interesting data for skill assessment. On the one hand, there...

Wikis are well known systems to support collaborative assignments. They provide a digital platform for asynchronous collaboration between students under the monitoring of a supervisor. Additionally, as all the students interactions are recorded in the wiki database, teachers can retrieve interesting data for skill assessment. On the one hand, there...

The appropriate categorisation of written information by health professionals is very important to guarantee its accessibility. Unfortunately, the information technology tools that support professionals on that task imply a heavy workload, so that the responsibility for categorising the written content is often delegated to administrative staff. We...

The performance in generic skills is increasingly important for organizations to succeed in the current competitive environment. However, assessing the level of performance in generic skills of the members of an organization is a challenging task, subject to both subjectivity and scalability issues. Organizations usually lay their organizational le...

Los futuros profesionales del área de Ingeniería Informática deben ser capaces de desenvolverse satisfactoriamente en un conjunto de competencias genéricas y específicas. Durante sus estudios, los estudiantes desarrollan estas competencias, dando más importancia a las que consideran que les serán de más utilidad. Sin embargo, puede que algunas comp...

Students’ acquisition of generic skills is key to their incorporation into the job world. However, teachers encounter several difficulties when measuring their students’ performance in generic skills. These difficulties increase in online courses based on learning management systems where there is no direct contact between teachers and their studen...

Las Frases Normalizadas para las Comunicaciones Marítimas (SMCP, del inglés Standard Marine Communication Phrases) son un compendio de enunciados, preguntas y respuestas con pautas procedimentales y funciones comunicativas específicas según los distintos tipos de mensaje que pueden surgir en el contexto de la navegación por distintos tipos de vías...

Virtual Worlds (VWs) have been widely used to support learning processes. One main advantage is providing valuable data on student behaviour and interaction. Nonetheless, most platforms provide only limited access to student logs. Moreover, accessing logs usually requires technical skills most teachers do not have. In this context, the authors pres...

Learning experiences based on multimodal interactive applications are becoming common at all educational levels. Designing assessments for learning applications is often addressed through learning analytics. Multimodal interactive applications generate a large amount of data about students' interaction that can provide insights about their profile,...

Purpose In a project-based learning experience, the detailed monitoring of the activities in which team members participate can be useful to evaluate their work. However, the project activity produces a large amount of data that can be hardly assessed by a single project supervisor. This poses an scalability issue if the number of users or projects...

El uso de wikis para realizar proyectos en equipo está cada vez más extendido. Para utilizarlo en ámbitos educativos ya no es necesario acudir a wikis externos, pues la mayoría de los entornos virtuales de aprendizaje disponibles en las universidades lo suelen incorporar. Entre sus ventajas destaca el registro de ediciones de los participantes y la...

El uso de mundos virtuales en la enseñanza se ha extendido en los últimos años. La descontextualización en que se sumergen los alumnos y la capacidad de registro de las interacciones que se producen (movimientos, intercambio de mensajes, acciones, etc.) son algunas de las características que las hacen especialmente interesantes para el aprendizaje...

En las experiencias de aprendizaje basadas en proyectos, la monitorización detallada de las actividades de los miembros de cada equipo puede resultar de utilidad para la evaluación de su trabajo. Mediante procedimientos de evaluación, los supervisores pueden evaluar las capacidades de trabajo en equipo con una finalidad formativa. Suelen aplicarse...

Las tecnologías wikis se utilizan ampliamente en entornos profesionales como herramientas de soporte a la edición colaborativa y on-line de documentación considerada de interés. Por otro lado, su uso a nivel académico contribuye al desarrollo de competencias genéricas como las promovidas por el EEES. En este artículo presentamos una experiencia rea...

Virtual worlds (VWs) have become increasingly popular to support students’ foreign language learning, especially beyond the classroom. Unfortunately students’ interaction in VWs is not always available for the supervisor and thus is not easy to analyse. Nonetheless, it provides interesting information not only in terms of assessment, but also to de...

Learning outcomes in higher education are defined as competencies, which are either specific or generic. The former refers to those skills specific to the subject studied. The latter, also known as transferable skills, refer to other capabilities that a capable professional has to put into practice to work in real-world. Generic competencies are us...

Nowadays, virtual learning environments are developed as digital ecosystems based on existing resources, applications, and web services. Even if they are not hosted in a centralized course management system, they are usually highly coupled. In this paper, we show how semantic technologies can help decoupling them. We build an e-learning web ecosyst...

The Learning Management Systems provide a set of facilities for the lecturer to manage his courses. Unfortunately, they have limitations when it comes to assessing generic skills. In most of them, every activity is assessable but just with a simple grade and there is not a direct link between activities and generic skills. In this work we present t...

In recent years, the focus on higher education learning has shifted from knowledge to skills, with interpersonal skills likely being the most difficult to assess and work with. Wikis ease open collaboration among peers. A number of these skills can be objectively assessed by using wikis in an educational environment: collaborative writing, conflict...

The focus on assessment of learning experiences has shifted from knowledge to competences. Unfortunately, assessing certain competences is mainly a subjective task, being problematic for both the evaluators and the evaluated. Additionally, when the learning process is computer-supported and the number of students increases, traditional assessment p...

The focus on assessment of learning experiences has shifted from knowledge to competences. Unfortunately, assessing certain competences is mainly a subjective task, being problematic for both the evaluators and the evaluated. Additionally, when the learning process is computer-supported and the number of students increases, traditional assessment p...

The importance of the video game and interactive entertainment industries has continuously increased in recent years. Academia has introduced computer game development in its curricula. In the case of the University of Cadiz, a non-compulsory course about ``Video Game Design'' is offered to Computer Science students. In the artificial intelligence...

Son muchos los centros educativos a todos los niveles que utilizan cursos virtuales como herramienta de apoyo a la docencia. Los profesores han de planificar estos cursos con anterioridad al inicio de los mismos, y como norma general, sitúan un documento estático informativo con la planificación en la zona superior del curso virtual. A posteriori,...

Wikis are common systems to support collaborative learning experiences. When the number of students and the amount of information stored in a wiki system increases, assessing each student’s work is difficult. Wikis keep a registry with differences between consecutive revisions of wiki articles that can be used for learning assessment. This informat...

La creciente importancia de la industria del videojuego ha provocado que algunas universidades estén incorporando materias afines en sus planes de estudios. Es el caso de la Universidad de Cádiz, con la asignatura "Diseño de Videojuegos" de la titulación de Ingeniería Técnica en Informática de Sistemas. La asignatura se articula principalmente medi...